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Sal Silvester's blog

Is every team member, from your front line employee to supervisor to mid-level manager and above, clear about the strategic direction of the organization? In most companies, it’s well into the calendar year before team members understand the vision and strategy. If this is the case on your team, you'll probably notice a lack of clarity, confusion and unspoken expectations. The business results you'll experience are lost productivity, low employee engagement, and missed opportunities.

I designed The Ultimate Goal Setting Guide after years of facilitating strategic planning and goal setting workshops for organizations and individuals. I wanted to make my proven process accessible to everyone, because I believe more than ever that we all need a clear vision and intention for how we live our lives.

So, what's your plan for 2012? Henry Ford said it best: Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are right! What you decide to focus on has a huge impact on the goals that you set for yourself and your ability to achieve those goals. To truly create and align goals with your wildest dreams and aspirations, you have to embrace a bold and audacious attitude.

When we are clear about what is most important to us, we can make choices that are aligned with what we want in our lives. Guiding principles help keep us focused throughout the year and give us a foundation to determine the choices we make every day. It is through those daily choices that we build our lives.

Here's a quick visualization exercise you can try to help you create your guiding principles. Journal about the following:

I wanted to share a quote from a book called The Rythm of Life by Matthew Kelly.

"Everything is a Choice. This is life’s greatest truth and its hardest lesson. It is a great truth because it reminds us of our power. Not power over others, but the often untapped power to be ourselves and to live the life we have imagined.”

He goes on to say that it’s a hard lesson because it causes us to realize that we have chosen the life we are living right now.

In a recent post, I mentioned that we all respond to our environment in a natural way. Sometimes our responses produce effective, long-term results. Other times, our responses are short-term and reactive. I compared two stances in life - a Problem-Reacting Stance and an Outcome-Creating stance.